My question at it's simplest is "What constitutes Railroading?" Does any overarching plotline by the GM mean the players are being railroaded? If railroading is defined as the GM forcing the players along a specific plotline, then is any story element that the GM introduces that makes certain choices more viable than others railroading? Is railroading always bad then? After all, as the GM, I'm still a player in the game too and there are things that I think are cool and would like to see happen in the game. Why is it railroading if I introduce those elements and not if a player does it? (Okay... so I have more than 1 question. Shoot me.)

As an example, let's take something like a Geas in D&D. Geas is a very powerful spell that can force a character to *do* something... like "You must find the Twinky of Doom and return it to me!" It doesn't say how the character does it or what choices he can make along the way but it does tend to funnel him in a specific direction at times. So, is using a Geas in a game railroading the players? Always? Never? Sometimes?

One of the commonly accepted rules in roleplaying is that what a PC thinks, feels, and decides to do is completely up to the player. If the GM tells a player what his character decides, that's railroading. But also, in more subtle ways, if the GM unilaterally removes all meaningful choice from the character that is also railroading.

It is always bad, as it removes the player's major participation in the game.

What if the player had plans to do something other than seek the twinky of doom? It only takes a bit of discussion and agreement among the group. The players may agree that going after the twinky is okay now, as long as Durf the Barbarian gets to rescue his unladylike love first.

I personally define railroading to mean anytime the GM only leaves one possible outcome to an event. Sometimes this is the GM saying "no, you can't do that," and sometimes it's just the GM just making it obvious that's there's only one "right" decision.

I think the issue with railroading is that the GM is making decisions for the player. This removes the player's ability to impact the story in any meaningful way. This leads to Illusionism, the illusion that the players can impact the story when really the GM is pulling all the strings.

Is it always bad? Not if the players know about it upfront and they're OK with that style of play.

[cross posted with Alan]

Alan wrote: One of the commonly accepted rules in roleplaying is that what a PC thinks, feels, and decides to do is completely up to the player. If the GM tells a player what his character decides, that's railroading.

Gaerik wrote: Then why ever have mind affecting spells in the game or should players be the only characters with access to those spells?

Gaerik wrote:

Alan wrote: One of the commonly accepted rules in roleplaying is that what a PC thinks, feels, and decides to do is completely up to the player. If the GM tells a player what his character decides, that's railroading.

Then why ever have mind affecting spells in the game ... ?

... or should players be the only characters with access to those spells?

If you a do a search for the word 'illusionism" you'll get some good stuff relating to this. I invite all forge regulars who know this stuff better than I to correct me.

Illusionism is a functional style of play, and a very common one. Basically, the GM has a story line he wants to players to follow. This GM is GM influence over character decisions; it has to be to a degree. It is also generally covert, meaning the GM uses things in character to manipulate things (he doesn't usually tell the players explcitly where to go). Outcomes can be relatively pre-determined or left open.

Now, as I said, this can be a functional style of play. Now we get to the important part: the social contract. The difference between railroading and illusionism is when a GM railroads, he violates the social contract over what he is allowed to do to a player character.

What does this mean? Well, it means what constitutes railroading is necessarily different in different gaming groups. What might feel like a great compelling story to some players may feel like coercive pushing to others. There is no absolute right answer to where that boundary is, which means we figure it out through social interaction. Ron, GNS, and several non-GNS texts (such as Nobilis) encourage talking about all this before the game even starts, to minimize problems.

So, let's deal with issues of mind-control spells. In a game that has a lot of those, I would say that might be something people may want to work out ahead of time. It solves the problem of the GM thinking it is OK to do something, and a player thinks it is ultimate betrayal. I have personally been in games where it was perfectly acceptable for a villain to try to mind-control the big, stupid fighter to attack his own part. I've also been in a group where telling a player "Your character feels angry about X" lead to an hour long argument.

Personally, I'd rather have my character mind-controlled than be told what he feels (unless that is also a form of mind control).

As far as I can tell in my gaming experience, Illusionism is pretty much the default stance in much of roleplaying. Not everybody wants to get a director's chair; lots of people are happy to ride the rails, as long as it's a wild ride.

DannyK wrote: Personally, I'd rather have my character mind-controlled than be told what he feels (unless that is also a form of mind control).

As far as I can tell in my gaming experience, Illusionism is pretty much the default stance in much of roleplaying. Not everybody wants to get a director's chair; lots of people are happy to ride the rails, as long as it's a wild ride.

Alan wrote: One of the commonly accepted rules in roleplaying is that what a PC thinks, feels, and decides to do is completely up to the player. If the GM tells a player what his character decides, that's railroading. But also, in more subtle ways, if the GM unilaterally removes all meaningful choice from the character that is also railroading.

It is always bad, as it removes the player's major participation in the game.

Tomas HVM wrote:
Seriously; lay aside the silly notion that "railroading is always bad".

I hate the idea of the GM leading anyone around by the nose as well. But, the problem is that the GM must accommodate the choices of players. It’s impossible for the PC to choose “anything” and for the GM to be on-the-spot prepared for all choices. I think the solution here is very careful and patient character creation. The player and the GM must be on the same page and thoroughly understand the character and his motivations. Once the player’s mind is understood by both parties, then the choices of the PC can be reasonably anticipated by the GM.

There is the issue of character consistency. It’s possible for the player to make a mistake playing his character. If a character is established to be, say, extremely selfish, and if the player decides to have his character acting in an altruistic way, he is erring. In these cases, the GM and player should have a discussion about it.

As far as magic controlling players, if those spells exist in your game worlds, then by all means, your PCs are prone to suffer their effects.

As far as the GM setting up scenarios that seems to be forcing the PCs down a choiceless path—this is a failing in the GM’s creation of his world. Game worlds should be rich, filled with a multitude of things occurring, only some of which involve the PCs. If the game is set up where every piece of information is a cue for the PCs to act on, the world would feel shallow and contrived.

Hey folks,

We've talked about this topic a lot at the Forge, and rule #1 about this topic is, "railroading means different things to different people." When you use the word, the reader 'sees' something very different from whatever it is you 'saw' when you typed it.

If someone less fatigued than me can look up the threads with TrizzlWizzl and other related threads about all this stuff, and list them soon in a post here, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Best,
Ron

One thread I think is important to this (so much so that I looked it up while reading, before I got to Ron's call for threads) is Does Module Play Equal Participationism? It surprises me that it was not a year ago that Illusionism, Participationism, and Trailblazing were distinguished.

I think Nick may be confusing Illusionism with Illusionist Techniques; they are not the same. Illusionist techniques are those which sereptitiously remove the force of a player choice in a specific instance to enhance play; Illusionism is the persistent use of such techniques to control all directions and outcomes such that a pre-planned (or referee-determined, even if improvised) story will be told over which the players have no real influence, but are unaware of this.

Ron is correct that the meaning of the word Railroading is uncertain. Part of that is because people tend to describe it in terms of what they find unacceptable to them, and others see that as acceptable. I think that the best definition of railroading would be something like this: the player's control over events in the shared imaginary space is considerably lower than he expects.

For example, in my current work on Why Spy in Multiverser: The Third Book of Worlds, I include a scenario in which there is heavy use of illusionist technique to achieve a very specific aspect of play. In essence, all of the encounters in the scenario will be played in the order listed; it does not matter which direction the player turns within the high rise office building, because the maps are irrelevant and the encounters are not on the maps. The purpose is to build the feeling of a particular kind of movie story (Die Hard, Under Siege) in which the hero has to get past these obstacles to save the world. Many of the encounters are tropes of this kind of story, such as the civilian discovered who has not been caught by the villains. The player cannot either accidentally or by cleverness get to the end scenario before playing through the other bits; he has to go through the events as slated to get there.

At the same time, how the player handles these situations is completely up to him. He can avoid many of them, with a good roll and the choice to do so. He can create his own strategies, solve the problems he faces in any way he chooses. He can fail; he can turn many situations to his advantage. He can kill all the hostages himself and let God sort them out, or he can attempt to capture all the villains alive.

Some people would call this railroading. For them, the idea that they can't end-run the scenario and go straight to the big boss of the whole game means that the referee is forcing them to do something they don't want to do--they can't use their skills to get out of that part of the game. Whether it's because they would consider it really clever and successful to skip the mooks and take out the boss, or because they don't see anything interesting to address in the various situations that arise and just want to get out of this adventure as quickly as possible and on to something potentially more interesting, or because they don't see it as realistic because to them "realistic" has to mean that everything is already fixed on the map before they start play, the very idea that I would require them to move through these events in chronological order they find offensive.

Others would call this a very interesting adventure planning technique; to them, it would be no different from designing a dungeon complex in which you could not reach room B without passing through room A, nor room C without passing through B, and so to reach room Z you had to run the entire alphabet first. Such a dungeon design the might think a bit boring, but they wouldn't consider it unfair. Doing the same thing with events similarly might not be unfair to them. They get to make the important decisions, in that they respond to the encounters however they choose and can use any of a great variety of tactics and skills to do so, in any way they want.

Thus railroading comes to mean any form of play in which players don't get to make the decisions they think are important. The confusion comes in when one player reads another player's description of a session of railroading, and believes that for him that would have been a perfectly acceptable distribution of credibility in play. Thus one player reads the description of my above scenario with the label "railroading" from someone who doesn't like the approach, and they see it more as a person who finds it valuable, and based on that they conclude that railroading is not unacceptable play.

Does that make sense?

I don't think we particularly need it as a term, unless as a personal description, "I felt railroaded" or "the players felt railroaded".

I hope that helps.

--M. J. Young

Alan (on railroading) wrote: It's always bad.

Alan wrote: - without player consent, it's always bad.

If folks are interested in past Forge discussions defining railroading, you may want to check out these threads:

Is 'Railroading' A Useful Term
Illusionism: a new look and a new approach
So...What is Railroading? (Using Illusionism Terminology)

Note that the earliest one is over two years old.

Julie

Tomas, I hope you'll take a look at my previous post to get a better handle on why we can't agree.

The general definition of railroading in the minds of most posters here seems to be "the referee took control of my character without my consent". You are arguing for a definition that says "the referee took control of my character, but I agreed to let him do it".

Since there is no agreement on which is the correct definition, there's no way to settle the good/bad argument, but to say that if it's the definition generally accepted by most players it's bad, and if it's your definition it's perfectly good.

I would prefer to call what you are calling "railroading" illusionist techniques. As long as the players still have control over what matters to the players, and the referee is only taking control of things over which the players do not have any particular interest (that is, they don't care that the referee controls those things), illusionist techniques are quite functional. When it rises to the level called illusionism, that means that the referee is in complete control of everything without the players' consent, and is using his superior power in the game to prevent them from realizing that nothing they do matters because he is now going to tell his story with their characters, their cooperation being immaterial to this.

My sons sometimes call my tuna noodle casserole "cat food"; but they love it (so do the cats). If we had a discussion about whether people like to eat cat food, and I contributed that in my house we eat cat food all the time, because we call our tuna noodle casserole cat food, I've not really contributed to the discussion. It doesn't matter whether we call that casserole cat food, or even whether our cats also like it; everyone else is talking about something different.

On the thread Questioning Deprotagonization and Railroading, Ron Edwards recently wrote: The current definition for railroading, as far as I can tell from multiple discussions here, goes something like this:

Control of a player-character's decisions, or opportunities for decisions, by another person (not the player of the character) in any way which breaks the Social Contract for that group, in the eyes of the character's player.

The bolded section is the important part. Railroading is a "crime" at the level of Social Contract, as it pertains to Creative Agenda. Taking the jargon out, that means, "people hate getting their 'rights' of input taken away, although those 'rights' are wholly internal on their part."

M. J. Young wrote: The general definition of railroading in the minds of most posters here seems to be "the referee took control of my character without my consent". You are arguing for a definition that says "the referee took control of my character, but I agreed to let him do it".

Further reflection:

It may be that my position is conceived to be somewhat limiting. I choose my position out of necessity. I confess to be a firm believer in the necessity of focussing all design and theory-efforts at amateurs, while discussing roleplaying games. The reason being that the players are the vehicles of drama created in these games. In my view there is no way around the amateur player as the foundation of the roleplaying game. Design and theory should reflect this.

In my view roleplaying games is in a special position compared to other media, due to it's dependency on active and co-authoring amateurs, and these participants being the true audience of the media as well.

Tomas HVM wrote:
It is better to redefine this term, and work for the reform of it's use, than to use the more vague "illusionist techniques". I'm also strongly for a new focus on what is called the "social contract". Too much of the common content of this "contract" is dictated by historic accidents.

I'd rather call it "steering techniques", if it comes to inventing a new term for it. It's all about steering the players/characters to facilitate a certain direction of play, or to focus on a specific dramatic theme.

It may be done bad, as well as every other tool. In my experience all effective tools of roleplaying games, may be used too little or too much, or misused in some other way. I have won public acclaim for the appliance of my stance in this issue. Every time I competed for "The Game Master Championship" at Arcon, the biggest gamefair in Scandinavia, I won using techniques including different kinds of railroading. I was voted Champion three years in a row, by players of all affiliations, and scored full house every time, in the important category of "player involvement and interaction".

The problem with the existence of "railroading", as the term is commonly used today, is that it completely overshadows a whole range of effective tools. This has to be rectified. Too many players are lost in the totality of this term, understanding it to be some big-badness of roleplaying games, including all positive notions of it. Too many game masters are left with a stunted range of tools due to this.

You can not ignore the continual damage caused by such a broad misrepresentation of a central issue, linked to such a commonly used term. It is unrealistic to expect players to stop using the term, so we will have to instill it with some positive meaning, making it possible to argue the positive sides of railroading. Thus we may stop the effects of negative gaming experiences from spreading like cancer in our thinking, our theories, our design, and our gameplay.

As for "illusionism"; it is vague, a "strange" term to most players, and misrepresenting the issue. The techniques involved in railroading, is not linked to some illusion of players having a free choice. It may be done that way, yes, and mostly done bad. The bad use of it should not be the basis of it's understanding, not as is, nor in any new term on it.

Railroading as such, however, is linked to the ramifications of the player/character choices being tighter at some stages of the game. There is a great host of effective tools to be used for this, tools that enhance players engagement, their immersions in character, and their joint efforts to create a great drama.

I hope you see that this is a constructive way of addressing the issue.

MJ: Thanks for making such an excellent point about the use of terminology as illustrated by your cat food example. I feel like a lot of discussion at the forge (and elsewhere!) is due to miscommunications because words have different meanings for different people. Even when we define our terms up front, we have a hard time letting go of the connotations we attatch to words. What may seem like a "natural" or "common sense" definition to one person may seem totally wrong to another.

As for this discussion, I think that since railroading has a strong negative connotation for most of us, it is a good idea to stick to Ron's definition of RailRoading specifically as the DYSFUNCTIONAL use illusionist techniques. By this definition it makes no sense to say that railroading is good, since by definition it is dysfunctional. I don't really care if we call the functional version of this "illusionist technique" or something new like "steering techniques," although since most of us at the forge are used to "illusionism" as a term we may as well stick with it. Since by definition illusionism means "control of a player-character's decisions, or opportunities for decisions, by another person in any way which is in accord to the Social Contract for that group" there is nothing wrong with it. No one is saying that there is.

I think there is a strong general consensus here that good = functional = in accord with fun and the social contract of the group; and that bad = dysfunctional = breaking the social contract of the group.
To disagree with these equations is to say that your prefered way of playing is the "right" way and that it is inherently better than others, which I think is very much against the spirit of the forge. Good and bad can ONLY be determined within a group's social contract.

That said, with these definitions of railroading and illusionism, there is no arguing that railroading is bad and that illusionism is good. No one in this discussion has disagreed with the ideas of these statements. The disagreement has been entirely over the definitions of these terms, not the ideas themselves. There is nothing "revolutionary" about the statement "railroading is not always bad" because all it amounts to is a modification of the definition of railroading to include functional illusionist techniques, which no one claimed were bad in the first place.

Tomas:

The style of discourse at The Forge is cast largely in Ron's image, and Ron is an academic. Most of the rest of us aren't.

Academics are used to establishing specialized meanings for words, and adhering to the terminology established by their predecessors even if it doesn't seem (to them) like the best possible choice, because that's the style that they've found, over the course of centuries, to lead to the most productive discourse about abstractions. Because the style of communication here at the Forge is influenced by the Western European academic tradition as represented by Ron Edwards, Forgers do that too. It sometimes seems strange to outsiders, but it's how we do things, and it's proven useful to us, too (albeit not over the course of centuries).

Even if the Forge-standard definition of "railroading" seems somewhat counterintuitive to you, therefore, please see if you can bring yourself to accept it and move on. Arguing about what word to use isn't going to get us anywhere useful.

Actually one of the advantages of illusionism as a term is that it doesn't have heavy negative connotations, but it does describe play that violates the social contract; the form of play in which players have consented to giving control to the referee is referred to as participationism (Mike Holmes). Both use illusionist techniques, that is, they use methods of negating the impact of player choices where player choices would derail desired outcomes or directions. However, there are many forms of play which use illusionist techniques. Ron's own notion of the moving clue is an application of illusionist technique used to prevent play from failing due to a player decision taking it in an unprofitable direction. (The moving clue works like this: the players need to know a specific piece of information in order to work out the secret of the game. Rather than place it with character A and hope that the player characters think to ask character A about this, the information is given to some character of whom the players do ask the right question, and that way the players are guaranteed to get the information regardless of who they ask. That's an illusionist technique.) Use such techniques so thoroughly that no player decision matters and you've got either illusionism (if the players don't know that their decisions don't matter) or participationism (if they've agreed to this mode of play).

Tomas, I can argue that the sorts of play commonly called Munchkin, Power Gamer, and Rules Lawyer are positive forms of play within the right context. I think they can in fact be so. However, these labels have negative connotations throughout the role playing game world, as far as I'm aware (well, except among a few hard-core gamists, who can admire someone with these skills--Did you see how Bob called the referee on that? Man, I thought our goose was cooked, but he pulled that rule out of nowhere, and man, did that save us.). If I'm going to try to change perception of the words, I've got an uphill battle. If I could get everyone at The Forge, Gaming Outpost, RPGnet, and ENWorld to agree that these were terms that described a positive and acceptable play style (which I could not do), that would be a drop in the bucket in terms of the players out there. As you observe, the majority of players are amateurs. Your efforts to convert their understanding of "railroading" into a positive idea is going to require more clout than Gary Gygax and Peter Adkison together have in this hobby.

Of course, tilt at windmills if you like; maybe you'll manage to slay a giant.

--M. J. Young

M. J. Young wrote: Tomas, I can argue that the sorts of play commonly called Munchkin, Power Gamer, and Rules Lawyer are positive forms of play within the right context.

Tomas HVM wrote:
Your argument is void. It don't touch upon the issue at hand; "railroading" being a fully viable term, substantial and to the point, easily transported into the realm of positive understanding, and far better than "illusionist techniques".

I am confused about this, because long before I came to the Forge I encountered the term "railroading" constantly in the context of RPG's. It was always used negatively; it didn't simply mean what here is called Illusionism, but a way of forcing PC's to follow predetermined tracks -- rather like cars following railroad tracks. The best I can say about railroading is that if you're going to do it, it had better be the Orient Express, because exploration of anything is heavily constrained if you can't decide what route you will take.

What's the point of changing this to a new term? Perhaps the term means little to you, but it means a lot to a lot of gamers, many of them not at the Forge. And to propose "steering" as an alternative seems doubly silly: you aren't even changing the metaphor, except to make it shakier -- the point of railroading is that all the steering is done by the GM, who lays down the tracks. Why is this harder to follow -- given that, for example, there's no point in getting on a train to Calais and hijacking it to take you to Cuba -- than steering, which presumably involves some control over the direction? The nice thing about riding a railroad is that you don't have to steer. That's the point of the metaphor.

Aren't we just having an aesthetic debate about which metaphors and terms you happen to prefer, as against everyone else around here? Fine, I guess, but you have to convince me that you're right, not just carp about how some terms bug you.

My personal, quick summery of railroading runs like this (and reflects previous posts)

Play is always railroaded. Play in a simple fantasy setting with a moon, and if the GM doesn't provide a rocket ship to get there, he's railroaded you away from exploration of the moon.

But generally this is actually agreed to. They want their noses in a dungeon perhaps, and never even think about the moon.

Okay, say they are in that dungeon. They find that each room in it has one entrance and one exit, and each entrance closes as they enter a new room.

Now, one group begins to growl and raise fists. But a second group playing the same dungeon latter are jolly and happy.

Why? Because just as much as the first group didn't get angry when they werent provided a path to the moon, the second group doesn't mind that they are provided no extra path options.

Imagine two parallel lines, outside of which no play exists. The first group likes them to be wide apart but not so apart they must enclude moon travel. The second does not mind if the two lines almost meet (by almost, I mean they probably still like to decide where they walk in each room).

However, when these 'rail' lines move closer to each other than agreed upon, it's a real problem as its a social contract breach and is called railroading. However, while they're at the agreed positions or wider, although play is still within two rails, it isn't called railroading (probably someone can think of a better term). However, as you can see with the above example, one mans railroading is another mans 'just fine'.

On a side note, this is why illusionism without consent really worries me. Yes, it may work. You may have happy players. But that's because their not aware the agreement was broken, not because you kept to the agreement and produced a good game because of it.

Though on the flip side, I think that perhaps illusionism is perhaps very ironic. For example, say a player can go east or west, but the GM will make him end up at a town regardless. It sounds like no choice, but personally I see the player handed director stance is a velvet basket. It's the play who is going to decide, east or west, where this town ends up existing. His choice does matter to a degree, perhaps a very strong degree.

Henri wrote: There is nothing "revolutionary" about the statement "railroading is not always bad" because all it amounts to is a modification of the definition of railroading to include functional illusionist techniques, which no one claimed were bad in the first place.

Henri wrote: I think that since railroading has a strong negative connotation for most of us, it is a good idea to stick to Ron's definition of RailRoading, specifically as the DYSFUNCTIONAL use of illusionist techniques. By this definition it makes no sense to say that railroading is good, since by definition it is dysfunctional.

Henri wrote: ... by definition illusionism means "control of a player-character's decisions, or opportunities for decisions, by another person in any way which is in accord to the Social Contract for that group".

Tomas.

Your posts have the tone of an increasingly despirate person who has made an entirely unsupportable statement and now is unwilling to concede that they've made a grievious error, so you keep hammering the same things over and over in the hopes that repetition will make it stick.

Frankly. You are wrong. Your point about rail roading is wrong.

Your attempt to define a "neutral" definition for rail roading is nonsensical.

Railroading is the use of techniques to focus the range of possible character-choices

To rush or push (something) through quickly in order to prevent careful consideration and possible criticism or obstruction: railroad a special-interest bill through Congress.

To convict (an accused person) without a fair trial or on trumped-up charges.

Tomas, perhaps you missed my post in the Academic Jabberwocky thread. It explains that the problem is you're using "Railroading" to mean something that we have a different term for: "Force."

Tomas wrote: This definition is false.

For the most recent Glossary installment, Ron wrote: Railroading Control of a player-character's decisions by the GM, or opportunities for decisions, in any way which breaks the Social Contract for that group, in the eyes of the character's player.

For the most recent Glossary installment, Ron wrote: Force Originally called "GM-oomph" (Ron Edwards), then "GM-Force" (Mike Holmes) - Control over the protagonist characters' thematically-significant decisions by anyone who is not the character's player. The Force is an especially good term for this phenomenon, due to (1) its sense of imposed mandate and strength-in-control (not just input), and (2) its parodic Star Wars connotation - whatever you want the plot to be, "use the Force!".

Valamir wrote: Consider this dictionary definition of Railroaded:

To rush or push (something) through quickly in order to prevent careful consideration and possible criticism or obstruction: railroad a special-interest bill through Congress.

To convict (an accused person) without a fair trial or on trumped-up charges.

Tomas,

Good to know.

I should also apologize for the tone of my post. I let my frustration with the thread display more hostility than was warranted.

Ralph.